What was Schopenhauer’s conception of politics and what made it distinctive in his era? Prominent Schopenhauer readers in the nineteenth century held different views on the philosopher’s contribution to political thought. According to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer should be praised for his narrowly circumscribed definition of the state in a period in which the state tended to be overvalued and idolized; Schopenhauer was a defiant minimalist. As Nietzsche observed in his untimely meditation on Schopenhauer as educator (1874), many people – professors of philosophy among them – saw the citizen’s duty to the state as the highest human duty, and the welfare and glory of the national state as the noblest human purpose. Such a quasi-religious exaltation of the state, Nietzsche continued, was not so much a relapse into paganism as a relapse into sheer “stupidity [Dummheit].”¹ Better than anyone else in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche added, the fiercely independent Schopenhauer, beholden to no institution or government, had pointed to the limits of politics. The “problem of existence [das Problem des Daseins],” Schopenhauer believed, could not be solved through some political event or ingenious political arrangement.² No political reform or revolution could adequately address the fundamental issues of the meaning and value of life, and the less people were concerned with the business of politics, the better. The major questions of any society and any age would always be existential and philosophical, not political. In fact, any state in which people other than government leaders were preoccupied with politics would simply be a poorly organized state.

Writing two years later than Nietzsche, in 1876, the philosopher Philipp Mainländer likewise noted Schopenhauer’s almost dismissive attitude toward the state.³ Contrary to Nietzsche, however, Mainländer criticized Schopenhauer’s apparently condescending attitude toward the state as inconsistent with his simultaneous recognition of the state’s necessity. Even in its limited role as a device of protection, Mainländer argued, the state nonetheless creates the preconditions for the redemption of humankind, because only political coordination in and through the state can mute conflicts among people and thereby give individuals opportunities to develop their talents and faculties in peace. It is thanks to the stabilizing presence of the state that spiritually gifted people eventually come to see clearly, through education and contemplation, that “non-existence is better than existence [daß Nichtsein besser ist als Sein].”⁴ By subduing conflict and allowing for sustained reflection, the state itself is not the most advanced stage and highest purpose of humanity but it does represent a crucial, even indispensable step toward greater metaphysical insight and spiritual resolution. Schopenhauer should have recognized the implication of his own thought, Mainländer concluded, namely, that the construction of a state is a necessary “condition [Bedingung]” for human salvation.⁵ In Mainländer’s discussion of Schopenhauer, the role of the state in human history appears paradoxical: only the escape from the desperate struggle for survival, that is, only the entry into the condition of statehood, gives human beings the chance to realize that they must themselves strive for “self-annulment.”⁶ The state allows its subjects to move toward enlightened self-dissolution rather than perish through violent conflict with others.

As both Nietzsche and Mainländer noted, Schopenhauer put the state in its place – this was his contribution to political thought. “Healing and salvation [Heil und Erlösung],” Schopenhauer wrote in his 1816 notebook, flow from ascetic practice, which stills the metaphysical will and releases the individual into a state of blank serenity.⁷ In contrast, the state is a collective instrument by which to moderate and prevent, but not eradicate, interpersonal conflict. As such, the state represents an extension and affirmation of the will, not a redemptive negation of it. As Nietzsche and Mainländer agreed, this meant that political action and statehood could never be the final horizon of humanity for Schopenhauer. The two Schopenhauer readers only disagreed on whether politics and statesmanship should be seen as a seductive distraction from higher purposes (Nietzsche) or as their necessary precondition (Mainländer).

Schopenhauer understood politics as a rationalization of a chaotic world. The emergence of a state, he held, is only possible among humans equipped with conceptually mediated deliberation and calculation – in short, with reason. Specifically, the pact at the heart of the state, the social contract, can come about because self-interested individuals transcend their initially narrow horizon. Thanks to rational reflection, they can extricate themselves from their immediate needs and desires to consider the likely actions and reactions of others, with whom they then also begin to communicate, coordinate, and cooperate. People construct a legal order, Schopenhauer wrote in the 1816 notebook, through a “stepping out [Heraustreten]” of their initially narrow viewpoints, which they can do with the “aid of reason [mittels der Vernunft].”⁸ The state can be formed when people have ceased to be obtusely and fatally egocentric, although they remain stubbornly egoistic. Individuals concerned with order and justice have not suddenly become altruistic, but they have understood and accepted that there are other individuals in the world and that they all can coexist more easily if they agree to live under the same laws.⁹ In Schopenhauer’s idiom, the establishment of statehood depends on an inchoate, nonmetaphysical realization that the will is divided and dispersed: humans locked in struggle with another begin to have at least some practical understanding of the fact that “the will to life appears in a plurality [Pluralität] of individuals,” and that each can benefit from adjusting to all others.¹⁰

In Schopenhauer’s works, politics is synonymous with the application of reason to the problem of perpetual strife. For him, politics must be narrowly understood as the rational management of ineluctable conflict among egoists who can never put their trust in any natural community of kinship or nationality, spontaneous and harmonious sociability, or public-spirited republicanism. The default state of humanity is a war of all against all, and this condition is not a political one, but simply a violent chaos. Politics only begins when the preservation and expansion of life is converted into a “rational and thus methodical [vernünftige, also methodische]” enterprise.¹¹ The human animal, or the political animal, pursues the same (ultimately pointless and futile) goal as the animal – to sustain, extend, and strengthen life – but the means have become more subtle and sophisticated, more geared toward creating enduring security. For Schopenhauer, politics is still an activity engaged in by ferociously self-interested beings, but their actions are modulated and channeled by rationally grounded foresight. Reason, Schopenhauer declared, “deserves to be called a prophet” since it allows people to forecast the consequences of their behaviors and thus facilitates long-term thinking and cautious restraint, essential ingredients of political conduct (PP II: 531). To list some prominent examples, the construction of a state relies on the ability of individuals to prognosticate outcomes and negotiate with others in a shared language; the signature trait of the statesman is the combination of an energetic will with an anticipatory intellect; and prudent action results from self-restraint grounded in realistic risk assessment. In all these cases, politics is synonymous with strategizing.

Thanks to institutional and social inventions such as the state or conventions of politeness and respect, politics allows for the egoistic pursuit of resources in a more carefully engineered and continuously supervised and hence more predictable social environment. Yet in a deeper sense, Schopenhauer thought that politics always fails. It moderates the effects of the will’s pluralization but does not address the underlying problems: first, the problem of fragmentation in the domain of representation and, second, the metaphysical problem of the perpetually striving will itself. In this sense, politics is an activity with obvious limitations; as both Nietzsche and Mainländer recognized, some problems lie forever beyond the compass of politics.

How does politics remain insufficient to Schopenhauer? In the realm of representation, the unitary will is shattered into billions of endlessly warring wills. Politics then emerges, Schopenhauer explained, as the reason-based attempt to reconcile these myriad (human) wills with one another for the achievement of public security. The state constitutes an attempt to piece together the fragmented will into a stable configuration, one that reduces the level of intra-will violence. Yet it seeks to resolve the problem of conflict without ever being able to eliminate the fundamental disunity that is the very way that the world appears, and without ever affecting the will itself, which continues to strive into infinity. Even in a strictly absolutist monarchy, in which power is concentrated in the singular sovereign and the number of politically operative wills has been reduced to the lowest possible number, latent strife is always ready to burst out once unfettered. The rule of one sovereign is, Schopenhauer thought, only the most efficient among poor substitutes for an actual deindividualization of the will’s fragments, or a deactivation of the will itself. Even in a neo-absolutist key, politics is a surface-level activity that neither reverses individualization nor tranquilizes the will. In a double sense, statehood contains the brutal chaos that results from the discordant interaction of will and representation – it cages and confines that chaos but also includes it and consists of it.

The core problem of politics as the rational but nonredemptive management of strife ultimately lies with reason itself. Arguing against German philosophers who came before him, Schopenhauer questioned the glorification of reason as a “world-structuring” and “history-guiding” power.¹² In the words of one scholar, Kant’s philosophy demoted God and theology, whereas Schopenhauer’s philosophy dethroned rationality itself by understanding it as just one of many different manifestations of the will.¹³ For Schopenhauer, human rationality is simply an outgrowth of something nonrational and remains “ontologically dependent” on it.¹⁴ In his view, reason emerges from the simultaneously opaque and blind force that is the endlessly “hungry will” (WWR I: 179) and remains closely attached to its matrix in a relationship of outright “servitude” (WWR I: 177); reason merely helps the will to achieve its goals. As species of rationality, political thinking and acting are also forms of behavior that ultimately derive from and obediently serve a prior striving and desiring. For Schopenhauer, politics even seems to be the field in which the merely instrumental character of reason, its attachment to and servile promotion of the will, becomes evident on a collective, society-wide scale. In the realm of political action, reason is very clearly working for the benefit of the will.

With the two elements above in place – the rational character of politics and the will-dependent, instrumental character of reason – one can define Schopenhauer’s conception of politics in more abstract terms. The interaction of the nonrational metaphysical substance (will) and the individualizing effect of cognition (representation) generates a world in which spatially and temporally bounded beings animated by will clash endlessly with one another – a war of all against all.¹⁵ Perception is responsible for the appearance of divisions and conflicts that politics tries to address. Yet in order to bring calm and security to the world by means of statehood and prudent self-management, politics relies on rational, concept-dependent thinking that, according to Schopenhauer, also has roots in perception: conceptual thinking arises “from intuitive representations”¹⁶ and works as a “device for structuring phenomena.”¹⁷ Schopenhauer thus argues that both the spectacle of perpetual strife and the political means to constrain it are ultimately rooted in the nature of human perception. Viewed in this way, politics involves something of a recursive movement: reason, which develops out of human cognition, applies itself to problems created by cognition itself. Politics thus consists in the attempt of empirically based human rationality to grapple with the problems of an empirically fractured metaphysical will. Yet, as already stated, this specifically political response to a universe of conflict is nonredemptive because it remains trapped in willing itself. For Schopenhauer, politics may be the highest stage of the will’s self-organization (rather than the will’s self-annulment) through cognitive means, which also renders it the most advanced way in which suffering is managed and prolonged rather than transcended.

Schopenhauer declared that the world has a fundamentally nonrational, “demonic heart,”¹⁸ but he held on to the idea that politics must be understood as the pursuit of security by rational means. Radical and revolutionary figures on both the left and the right have dismissed this notion of politics as security-oriented rationalization. Marx considered the concern with public security for the benefit of individuals as the quintessentially bourgeois project:¹⁹ a defensive vision by a class afraid to lose its property and unable to imagine a reformed world of human cooperation and solidarity. Writing with full knowledge of Schopenhauer’s works, Georg Lukács construed the philosopher’s view of society as an aggregate of security-seeking egoists to be an “expression of real existing alienation that defined capitalist society.”²⁰ Yet Marx and Lukács did not share Schopenhauer’s dark metaphysics of the will. Like Schopenhauer, avant-garde right-wing thinkers in the Nietzschean tradition such as the German author Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) have seen the world as a demonic place – perpetually dangerous and conflict-ridden – but, like Marx, have rejected the bourgeois politics of security as contemptibly anxious. According to Jünger, the more fitting response to a darkly irrational universe is to affirm danger, embrace risk, seek power, and wage war, not to try to domesticate the world with the pathetic means of reason.²¹ To some degree, Schopenhauer’s dethronement of reason likely paved the way for irrationalist attitudes such as the one of Jünger, but in the realm of politics, Schopenhauer himself remained committed to a (bourgeois) program of mutual restraint and state-supervised order.

It is difficult to place Schopenhauer neatly in one or the other political camp or to identify him with an ideology. He might seem quite like a libertarian, in that he argued for a government focused on defending property rights of individuals rather than more expansive social, moral, and educative missions that would, he thought, be needlessly costly and tendentially coercive. The libertarian movement emerged in Schopenhauer’s era, the middle of the nineteenth century, and was partly a response to the rise of socialism.²² Yet despite the partial similarities, the antisocialist Schopenhauer shared few of the other libertarian commitments: he had no rousing rhetoric to celebrate the absolute moral priority of personal freedom, he did not view political authority in general with great skepticism, and, finally, he possessed no enthusiastic vision of free market dynamism.²³

Schopenhauer’s dominant concern with the prevention of injury and cruelty to individuals is something that he shared with classical liberalism, which, according to Judith Shklar, was an ideology “born in horror” during an era of religious conflict and which strives to prevent the pain and injury “inflicted by others.”²⁴ Schopenhauer’s singular focus on the prevention of suffering seems to overlap with what Shklar famously called the “liberalism of fear.”²⁵ But even though Schopenhauer favored a disciplined government, he showed no particular interest in the fundamental liberal project of establishing a “limitation” and a “division” of governmental authority as the primary way to prevent abuses directed at individuals.²⁶ For him, the main threat to the average individual was the war of all against all, not the incursions of “the agents of the state” with their mighty resources of coercion.²⁷ His apprehensive attention to the possibility of violent anarchy (rather than the possibility of government encroachment) makes him a representative of the neo-absolutism of fear rather than the liberalism of fear.

In light of his nonliberal commitments, it might seem obvious that Schopenhauer should be seen as a conservative. His emphasis on incorrigible human egoism and pervasive malice as well as the ever-present political task to keep anarchy at bay certainly suggest an affinity with conservatives. For Schopenhauer as for many conservatives, the main political distinction was that between order and disorder, or between the civilized condition and the war of all.²⁸ His overarching political ideal was security and orderly stability, not the full flourishing of individuality or an end to social inequalities.²⁹ Yet as this book has sought to show throughout several chapters, Schopenhauer was not seen as a typical conservative in his own day. He may have repudiated democracy and republicanism, but his austere, purely functional absolutism would have been anathema to the defenders of divinely sanctioned rule, traditional patrimonial hierarchy, or organic social cohesion. Unlike the German Romantics, Schopenhauer had no strong interest in the Middle Ages or the feudal world but drew inspiration from hard-nosed seventeenth-century figures such as Hobbes and Gracián. In general, his writings lack the conservative political vocabulary of patriarchal and religious authority, hierarchy and loyalty, reverence and sanctity, community and family, tradition and memory. For him, civilization was an indispensable but nonetheless cynical masquerade, not a holy order.

It might seem equally obvious that the antisocialist, antidemagogue Schopenhauer stood far apart from any form of progressivism. He cared deeply about the prevention and reduction of harm, but he was less interested in remedying the unjust distribution of harm in society. For him, “the tormentor and the tormented” are, metaphysically speaking, “one,” an elementary identity concealed and distorted by the individualization in the realm of representation (WWR I: 381). This evident disinterest in distinguishing oppressor from oppressed makes Schopenhauer’s philosophy less useful as a resource for emancipatory social movements that champion the causes of underprivileged groups, racial and ethnic minorities, and the poor. His extreme misogyny is well known.³⁰ Yet Schopenhauer repeatedly spoke out against the systematic cruelty against vulnerable communities, and vehemently attacked contemporary defenders of slavery. His deep concern with the welfare of nonhuman animals likewise demonstrates his broad, inclusive understanding of suffering. Schopenhauer’s skepticism against emancipatory politics should not blind us to his acute and authentic awareness of the reality of exploitation, oppression, and cruelty. At the very least, he was far more interested in the plight of the enslaved and the abused than in the integrity and solidarity of national or religious communities.

Schopenhauer’s work is hard to place in a familiar ideological landscape partly because it presents us with a peculiar blend of egalitarian and inegalitarian attitudes. His elitism is easy to spot. On several occasions he wrote of a spiritual or intellectual aristocracy as the most authentic hierarchy in human society. “Nature,” he concluded in his polemical tract on university philosophy, is “aristocratic” and even more unequal than the most rigidly stratified society of feudal estates or castes (PP I: 176). The comparison even suggests a hint of frustration and perhaps envy of the nobility: human differences in mental acuity and talent, Schopenhauer insisted, are much more important, and much less malleable, than the distinctions among social ranks. The “rabble and rag tag,” Schopenhauer wrote, might succeed in overthrowing hereditary aristocracies, but they will be eternally unable to change anything about the natural inequality of intellectual gifts (PP I: 176).

At the same time, the metaphysician Schopenhauer argued that each of us is equally a splinter of a will that is the world’s true substance. As Georg Simmel pointed out in his 1907 lectures, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will presented a “metaphysical democracy” because it declared all individualization to be illusory and softened the customary theological and philosophical distinction between humans and animals.³¹ This philosophically motivated equalization is the basis for his vision of universal compassion. Human beings should recognize their “innermost and true self in all beings” and regard “the endless suffering of all living things” as their very own (WWR I: 405). Schopenhauer’s passionate condemnation of slavery and sympathy for its victims as well as his concern with child labor and monotonous factory work have deep roots in his thought.

Schopenhauer combined the arrogance of a self-proclaimed aristocrat of the mind with a metaphysics and an ethics that reduced all ranks and distinctions to nothing; he was both a great leveler and a big snob. Both attitudes shaped his political judgments. His intellectual inegalitarianism motivated his critiques of modern political movements that emphasize common interests, collective affiliation, or broad participation. For Schopenhauer, there is an elite that deserves the name “aristocracy,” and political positions that ignore or compromise this intellectual hierarchy are pernicious and must be rejected. According to him, this included most modern ideologies. Nationalism is bad because it grounds community in shared ethnic traits and shared language, despite unequal levels of individual intelligence. Socialism is distasteful because it reduces all human beings to mere physical beings, even consuming beasts, and thus erases all distinctions. American republicanism has many flaws, among them that it allows many mediocre minds to dominate the public arena. Theocracy or theological influences in politics must be avoided because the clergy wants to chain philosophical thought to the cruder teachings of the church.

This near-obsessive elitism alienates Schopenhauer from present-day progressives who care not just about the survival of all but about their genuine flourishing and argue for ambitious schemes of equitable resource distribution. Yet Schopenhauer’s inegalitarianism had clear bounds, imposed by his commitment to compassion. He was not a right-wing radical advocating for domination of the many by the few as the condition of emergence for a class of superior beings. While he certainly wanted undisturbed peace for the “natural” aristocracy of the intellect, he did not demand a full-fledged “aristocratic society” along Nietzschean lines, in which an elite subordinates the mass of humanity and mercilessly gazes at it with a “pathos of distance.”³² In his discussions of prudence, he made clear that the truly great minds of the world, a very rare species, would always perform poorly or retreat from the domain of political and military action. Geniuses have no ability to rule others, and rulers per definition do not qualify as geniuses; their intellects, however impressive, still only serve the will.

Ultimately, Schopenhauer’s obsessive concern with intellectual genius was linked to a jealous defense of the greatest pursuit of singular minds, namely, philosophy. He assigned one task to the state, that of keeping security: it should be exclusively focused on protecting the individual’s property and life from the incursions of the surrounding mass of egoists. Yet a good society for Schopenhauer is one that affords gifted minds the opportunity to seek philosophical truth without prior instructions from non-philosophical authorities. According to him, however, the state could not itself create a space for unrestrained philosophizing. When philosophers begin to strive for salaried employment at the state-funded institution of the university, they face too much competition from careerists, too much pressure from peer networks in control of departments, and too many demands from the state itself, which has an understandable but unfortunate interest in promoting government-friendly philosophical systems. The dominance of Hegelianism at German universities during his own adult life proved beyond doubt that the state is not a guarantor of quality philosophy. In this context, Schopenhauer’s defense of private property and the legitimacy of inheritance is at least partly motivated by the wish to safeguard the integrity of philosophy. Robust private wealth allows for leisure and above all social autonomy, and for this reason serves as the best guarantee of genuine freedom of thought. The comfortable rentier can pursue controversial lines of thought without having to adjust to popular opinion, hegemonic schools of thought, church doctrines, or governmental guidance. For Schopenhauer, individual property emerged as the bastion of an unrestrained intellectual life, and hence his bourgeois emphasis on the significance of private property coincided with his devotion to philosophy. Without his paternal inheritance, he wrote in his private notes, he would have achieved nothing as a thinker.³³

Formulated in a maximally charitable way, the equally egalitarian and inegalitarian Schopenhauer stands for two values: compassion for all who suffer and freedom for philosophically inclined minds to pursue the truth without intervention. Both these key values are likely attractive to many modern-day readers. Yet Schopenhauer believed that neither of these two commitments, one moral and one intellectual, could be directly translated into principles of political action. The state cannot and should not try to legislate compassion or institute moral education, strenuously work toward social justice, or provide a haven for philosophy. Instead, it should focus on reducing acts of aggression among egoistic individuals, including subjugation and enslavement, which Schopenhauer considered wrongs to be prohibited and militantly punished just like homicide or property theft. In other words, politics cannot be guided by fellow feeling or truth. A contractually based state with a sovereign regent at its head will deter crime, suppress conflict, and preserve stability, steering clear of both anarchy and despotism, the war of all against all and the domination of many by a master. In the very best case, such as in imperial China, the state will also not be entangled with theistic religious authorities.

Schopenhauer’s identification of politics with authoritarian harm reduction is unlikely to excite many today. He developed a tightly circumscribed view of what politics should focus on and could possibly achieve. But of course, within his vision of an irrational and infinitely hungry will as the substance of the world, rationality also has a limited scope and restricted role in the universe; reason mostly serves the powerful will. Schopenhauer cut down to size not only politics, but reason itself. Despite this reductive program, politics still has a much more important place in Schopenhauer’s thought than scholars have generally accorded it. It is well known that he declared human existence to be full of suffering. It is less well known that he identified the greatest source of human suffering to be the mutual aggression of human beings and then assigned politics the role of preventing and regulating interhuman conflict. In his view, politics cannot redeem the world and make it a blissful place – it cannot do away with hard labor, mental and physical illness, injury, pain, old age, and mortality, cannot quell inexhaustible desires, cure malice and sadism, satisfy always-returning dissatisfactions, or alleviate the deep dread of existential boredom. Yet without strategic cooperation, state deterrence, and prudent politeness – without the rational-political instruments to prevent and contain conflict – the world would be a hell of unfettered destruction.